A handful of novels worth reading before or during a visit to Bucharest:
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The Hooligan's Return by Norman Manea. A returning exile's memoir of pre-war Jewish Bucharest, the deportations to Transnistria, and the Communist decades. Manea fled in 1986 and came back in 1997; the book covers both the homecoming and the lifetime that preceded it. It is the best single account of what it meant to be Romanian and Jewish in the 20th century.
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The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller. The Romanian-born Nobel laureate's spare, devastating novel about a group of friends watched by the Securitate in the last years of Ceaușescu's regime. Mostly set in Timișoara but evokes the entire mood of late-Communist Romania, including the Bucharest of the period.
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For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian. A novel-cum-memoir written in 1934 by a young Romanian-Jewish writer documenting the rising antisemitism of inter-war Bucharest. Essential context for understanding the city's pre-war intellectual ferment and the catastrophe that ended it.
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The Hellburnt Heart (Inima de pe Lampă) by Mateiu Caragiale. A decadent fin-de-siècle Bucharest novel often called the strangest book in Romanian literature, set in the bars, brothels, and aristocratic salons of the early 1900s. Hard going but unforgettable.
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Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu. A vast, hallucinatory novel set in late-Communist Bucharest, by Romania's most celebrated living writer. Half autobiography, half surrealist fever-dream; if you fall for it, follow up with his earlier Blinding trilogy.